EAIS 8th Annual Conference on Israel Studies 2019 – Democracy in Challenging Times: Israel, Europe and the World

The European Association of Israel Studies is proud to confirm that our 8th Annual Conference will be taking place at Charles University, Prague from 8-10 September 2019. The conference will be held in English.

8 September  2019

16.00 – 16.30, Official opening of the conference (Magna Aula, Faculty of Law, Charles University)
Welcome of Prof. Lenka Rovná, CSc., (Vice-Rector for European Affairs, Charles University)
Welcome of doc. Michal Pullmann, Ph.D. (Dean of Faculty of Arts, Charles University)
Welcome of Prof. Joanna Dyduch, Ph.D. (Jagiellonian University and Chair of The European Association of Israel Studies)
Hosted by Prof. Jiří Holý, DrSc., and dr. Marcela Menachem Zoufalá, Ph.D. (Centre for the Study of the Holocaust and Jewish Literature, Faculty of Arts, Charles University)

16.30 – 17.45
Opening keynote lecture
Contemporary Archeology: Wadi Salib, Prof. Yfaat Weiss, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem/Leibniz-Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow

The so called “Wadi Salib Riots” of 1959 are undoubtedly an Israeli Icon. In public debates and collective memory they represent the failures and shortcomings by the Israeli establishment regarding the absorption of mass migration at the end of the 1940s as well as in the 1950s. The icon stands basically for the social and cultural inequality between the Ashkenazi veterans and the Mizrahi newcomers. The 60th anniversary of those events may open ways to different interpretations and a broader contextualization in time and space. This lecture will be excavating the past of British Mandatory Palestine (1920-1948) and observing the wider global perspective of ethnic homogenization following World War I.

Yfaat Weiss is Professor of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem since 2008. She is Director of the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow and Professor of Modern History, especially Jewish history, at Leipzig University since April 2017. From 2010 to 2017 she was Director of the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Centre for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History. Between 2008 and 2011 she served as head of the School of History at the Hebrew University and directed the Bucerius Institute for Research of Contemporary German History and Society at the University of Haifa between 2001 and 2007. She studied history and modern German literature at the University of Hamburg, and received her PhD from Tel Aviv University in 1997. Two of her current research projects are „Deutsch-jüdischer Wissens- und Kulturtransfer 1918 bis 1948: Das historische Archiv der Hebräischen Universität Jerusalem“ (in cooperation with the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, financed by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung) and „Traces and Treasures. Preserving and Exploring German-Jewish Collections in Israeli Archives” (in cooperation with the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, financed by the Federal Foreign Office). Professor Weiss has been an Honorary Fellow of the Historisches Kolleg Munich from March to August 2017. She has spent time as a Visiting Scholar at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna (2003), the Hamburg Institute for Social Research (2005–2006), the Remarque Institute, New York University (2007), the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem (2007–2008); she was Visiting Professor and Anna Lindh Fellow at the Europe Center, Stanford University (2013) and EURIAS Senior Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna (2014–2015). Selected Publications: Journey and Imagined Journey. Lea Goldberg in Germany, 1930–1933. Jerusalem 2014 (Heb.; Germ. 2010); Wadi Salib. A Confiscated Memory, Tel Aviv 2007 (Heb.; Engl. 2011; Germ. 2012); Sovereignty in Miniature: The Mount Scopus Enclave 1948–1967, in: Zion. A Quarterly for Research in Jewish History 83,2 (2018); Resting in Peace in No Man’s Land: Human Dignity and Political Sovereignty at the British Military Cemetery on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem, in: Jerusalem Quarterly Review 72 (2017), 67–85; »Nicht durch Heer oder Kraft, sondern durch meinen Geist«. Die Hebräische Universität in der Skopus-Enklave, in: Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook XIV (2015), 59– 90; Von Prag nach Jerusalem. Kulturgüter und Staatswerdung, in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 63 (2015), no. 4, 321–346.

Detailed programme TBA soon on the conference website.